Schneidemühl Detainees
Not Without a Trace: The Fate of Those Who Did Not Return

Introduction by Peter Simonstein Cullman

This database contains records for 512 people who were
detained in or deported from the district of Schneidemühl
in 1941.

Background

The following is a reconstructed chronology of events that unfolded
in Pomerania in 1940, an attempt to record the fate of every person who
was affected by the mass arrest of Jews in the wider administrative
district of Schneidemühl on that fateful Wednesday, 21 February
1940, leading to the tragic conclusions in 1941-44. These are the
names of those who became ensnared in the Naziís bureaucracy of
death. Very few of these men, women and children survived.
This is in homage to their memory.

The original number of detainees is reported to have been 544.
However, due to the poor condition of many of these lists, only the
names of 512 persons could be identified with reasonable certainty, and
even here it was not possible to account for the fate of all persons,
leaving a lacuna of thirty-one persons.

While great care has been taken in the accumulation and deciphering
of data, the spelling of names and places and the accuracy of personal
data gleaned from the lists is limited to the quality of some surviving
documents. Names will appear as on the original lists, unless they
could be corrected by comparing them to surviving pages of the 1939
census, extant civil records, or data supplied by the latest version of
the Gedenkbuch Berlins.

To determine family connections and the fate of each person, several
additional sources were consulted. Of particularly value were
Pages of Testimony that had been submitted by survivors to Yad Vashem
over the past five decades, thus some maiden names and family
relationships could be added to this database. Additionally, the
Theresienstädter Gedenkbuch, the Datenbank of the Landesarchiv
Berlin and the Głowna lists comprising of Judentransportgruppen
Nos. 473, 474, 475 from Głowna in Poznan (not to be confused with
Głowno near Lodz), together with records from the so-called
Jüdisches Umschulungslager in Bielefeld and the labor camps
Radinkendorf and Neuendorf, were most useful.

It should be noted that the Głowna lists had originally been
drawn up in family groups and frequently included names of persons who
were deported to Głowna at an earlier time and do not appear in
the Schneidemühl lists. Subsequently, some of these extra
names are mentioned in the text of the list below when it became
apparent that a person from the Głowna lists belonged to a
particular family in the Schneidemühl lists.

After their initial round-up, men, women and children were initially
held in Schneidemühl and kept prisoners in such locales as the
mortuary of the Jewish cemetery, the Jewish community building and the
makeshift quarters of the Bürgergarten, a local restaurant.
As soon as detailed lists of every person were drawn up, the Gestapo
began to shuffle most of the prisoners between transit camps, hospitals,
nursing homes, childrenís homes, old age homes, hospices and forced
labor camps in areas of Pomerania, Brandenburg and as far as Berlin,
Bielefeld and Frankfurt/M.

Of the arrested, six persons are known to have died in one or another
place of detention in Schneidemühl; they were largely the unmarried
elderly, ranging in age from fifty to ninety years, who succumbed to
illness and stress, thus in a tragic way evading the later
deprivations.

At least four persons are known to have perished in the forced labor
camps of Radinkendorf and Neuendorf; at least four men are known to
have been murdered in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

At least twenty-eight men and women died in Berlin after their
transportation from one institution to another; together with the two
persons who are known to have taken their own lives — they were
all still assured a Jewish burial in the Jewish cemetery of
Weissensee. Where known, the burial location within the cemetery
is recorded here, i.e. Feld P, Abteilung VII, Reihe 3, Grab 647258
(= Field P, Section VII, Row 3, Grave No. 647258).

At least three hundred and seventy-six men, women and children were
eventually deported to concentration camps and ghettos.

Even before the Wannsee-Konferenz of 20 January 1942 had legitimized
the Shoah, the first mass deportations of German Jews from the Reich
began in Berlin on 18 October 1941. The first persons of the
Schneidemühl Aktion to be deported were at least eleven men and
women who were sent to the Lodz ghetto. Those who survived the
squalor of ghetto life until the following year were either sent to
their death in Chelmno — deportations to this extermination camp
began on 16 January 1942, and lasted until April 1943 — or they
were deported to Auschwitz later.

Between 27 November 1941 and 26 October 1942, at least fifty-two men,
women and children were deported to the Riga ghetto where most of them
were murdered upon arrival.

At least eighty-nine men, women and children were deported to the
Warsaw ghetto with transports that began on 2 April 1942; most of these
persons who had not perished in the ghetto were later deported from
there to various extermination camps, although no definitive dates and
locations could be ascertained; at least eight persons are known to have
perished in Trawniki.

One hundred and twelve men, women and children are known to have been
sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto between 3 July 1942 and 17 June 1943;
of those who survived long enough, many were deported again, either to
Auschwitz or to Treblinka, some as late as 23 October 1944; with the
exception of one fifteen-year-old girl, most of these were the
elderly.

The largest numbers of victims, however, were the men, women and
children who were sent directly from Berlin to Auschwitz. Their
deportation began 2 March 1943 and lasted until 28 June that year, at
a time when the mass gassing of Jews was in full operation.

One outstanding case of fortitude was that of the
ninety-four-year-old Philipp Falkenstein from Flatow; he was one of
only eight persons from the initial raid in 1940 who survived the
deportations. At least eight men and women are known to have
succeeded in emigrating legally, several months after their initial
arrest.

The only known person born in Schneidemühl — arrested
in Berlin and not part of the mass arrests of 21 February 1940 —
who survived the hell of Auschwitz in a confluence of luck and timing,
was Barbara Weldon, née Schwarzbach.

Database

This database includes records for 512 individuals from
Schneidemühl detainees.

The fields for this database are as follows:

Surname

Given name

Maiden name

Date of birth

Place of birth

Spouseís surname

Spouseís given name

Fatherís surname

Fatherís given name

Motherís surname

Motherís given name

Comments

Acknowledgments

The information contained in this database was indexed from the copies
of salvaged lists of names and pages of correspondence between members
of the Jewish community in Berlin and Schneidemühl and the RSHA,
the Gestapo, the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, as well as
from the Akten Notizen, memoranda of Gestapo orders — all
compiled with astounding thoroughness but only partially preserved and
frequently fragmented.

In addition, thanks to JewishGen Inc. for providing the website
and database expertise to make this database accessible.
Special thanks to Warren Blatt and Michael Tobias for their
continued contributions to Jewish genealogy. Particular
thanks to Nolan Altman, coordinator of Holocaust files.